There is a Zen saying Sometimes, simply by sitting , the soul collects wisdom Today I was doing a lot of sitting . A year ago to the day I was driving to Shrewsbury to have the car serviced . Today I was doing the same thing . Sitting in the car, driving and just thinking about life in general . Truss had gone . Two candidates now stood plus Boris who had rolled back off his holidays and put his hat in the ring to our new Prime Minister again . The sun was shining . Last year the weather was very different . Cold and miserable . I was looking more forward to spend time walking the streets of Shrewsbury today than I did this time last year .
I arrived at the garage . - car service Just let me take you to the desk I sat down and was invited to have my first espresso of the day. How are you today ? The pleasantries always flow . The receptionists are blond and young . I wondered if they spoke any German . I wondered if there was a tick list
of all the attributes you needed to work for BMW. Would I fit the bill ? So what are you doing today ? Do you still ...............? Yes we do I was handed over a ticket for a free return ride on the Park and Ride bus into Shrewsbury . My plan was to sit in the garage for a few minutes , drink my coffee and read the local magazine I love Shrewsbury to see if there was anything I had missed that we could perhaps visit over the next few weeks . I checked out the John Cooper Works steering wheel . Not much different to mine . And at a cost of over £659 fitted . I wouldnt be changing mine then .
The walk up to the bus took me past the painted sheep, across the supermarket car park . I exchanged my voucher for my £2 bus ticket . Time to sit and think again . Where should I go first ? Down to the English Bridge and to the Abbey . We had visited the Abbey twice before and walked down Wyle Cop with its lovely black and white timbered houses
. Why did we not keep anything black and white in our city ? I had never really taken much notice of the shops on the way down . The windows were full of pumpkins or white plastic cobwebs . The odd large black spider and a witches broom . Halloween just round the corner and all the shop displays reflected Halloween or they showcased Autumn . Orange , brown and deep crimson displays of garlands made from leaves adorned shop doorways; The Christmas lights were up and Shrewsbury looked jolly.
As I crossed the English Bridge - there is a Welsh Bridge too - I looked over at the grey cold looking Severn . The bridge was impressive and I had never really given it a second thought before . I had crossed it heading for a work course in the local college . How to do drugs . Well not quite but how to work with customers with drug addiction problems . The bridge looked off but I read that it had been rebuilt in 1926 using the original stonework . The arches had been lowered and the roadway dropped . It was an impressive bridge nevertheless
. A boundary stone marked the meeting of two separate parishes My next port of call was the Abbey Gardens .. I found some gardens which were closed until later that morning . Inside there was a flurry of activity as the site was being filled with more pumpkins, more cobwebs and the children were expected on a pumpkin treasure hunt or something similar . Something to avoid I quickly thought to myself . The Abbey too was closed until 11am . As it was only 9.30 I had little choice but to wander the graveyard . There were few memorials which seemed odd in such a wealthy city . The graveyard had been cleared at some time for ease of maintenance which made it rather sterile .
I wandered round the back to a strange memorial . Flat grey a sort of shapeless thing I usually would pass by without a thought . However something caught my attention and with time on my hands I wandered over . It was a memorial to the First World War poet Wilfred Owen.
